BACK to Blog Posts

November 04, 2007 sunday
November 4th, 2007

QUIZ: Why is dark German rye bread called Pumpernickel?
------------------------------------------------------
history for 11/4/2007
Birthdays: Will Rogers, Walter Cronkite, Art Carney, Loretta Swit, Martin Balsam, Gig Young, Darla Hood, Joe Neikro, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ralph Maccio,Andrea McArdle, Matthew McConnaghey, First Lady Laura Bush

1530- Cardinal Wolsey had been the chief minister of King Henry VIII and dominated English politics for a decade. He was a European power broker and fancied himself a future Pope. But he lost favor with the King over his inability to get him a divorce from his first wife and his alliances on the continent lost them Calais, the last English stronghold on the continent. This day the King’s men arrested Cardinal Wolsey for treason. But being old and infirm he died on the way to the Tower.

1640- THE LONG PARLIAMENT- British King Charles Ist didn’t like parliaments. He found them pushy, always demanding rights for the common man and such. It had been 11 years since is last parliament and he had dismissed that one after three weeks. It was called "the Short Parliament”. But he needed money to put down rebels in Scotland. So Charles I reluctantly convened the Long Parliament. This one stayed in session for the rest of Charles' life and defeated and beheaded him in the English Civil War. The Long Parliament was finally disbanded by Cromwell and his army in 1652 and after Charles II ‘s restoration, the English parliament stayed more or less in regular sessions.

1646- The Massachusetts Bay Colony started to feel threatened by all the Quakers, Shakers, Anabaptists and other weirdoes coming in by the boatload from Europe. So they announced that the crime of Heresy was punishable by death. And of course heresy was anything the Massachusetts Bay Colony didn’t care to believe in. After hanging two Quaker preachers and driving others outside the walls to death at the hand of hostile Indians the heresy statutes were revoked by King Charles II.

1677- William III and Mary of Orange are married at St. James Palace.

1791- ST. CLAIRS DEFEAT- When President Washington sent General Arthur St. Clair to put down the Indian raids on the Ohio Frontier he advised him” Trust not the Indians, beware of surprise”. St. Clair, who had a rather lackluster military career in the Revolution, must have forgotten Washington’s advice because this day near what would be Celina Ohio St. Clair’s camp was surprise-attacked at dawn by thousands of Shawnee, Creek and Miami warriors. 900 American casualties including General Richard Butler. The spectacular defeat and massacre was led by Chief Little Turtle, who although he killed more US soldiers than died at Custers Last Stand, is barely remembered today. After the peace treaty in 1795 St. Clair finished life running a tavern and Little Turtle became a guest of George Washington. His grandson graduated from West Point.

1804- LEWIS & CLARK MET SACAJEWEA- The American explorers were spending the winter in a friendly Mandan village when a French Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau offered his services as a guide. He had two wives who were Shoshone (Snake) women. Sacajewea was then 15 and pregnant. Charbonneau won his wives in a bet with some Hidatsa warriors. Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau not because he would be useful as much as Sacajewea, because she spoke the languages of the western tribes beyond the Rocky Mountians. Sacajewea would speak to Shoshone and Nez Perce in their language, then translate into Hidatsa to Charbonneau. He would translate it into French to another trapper named Driar who would speak English to Lewis and Clark.
Despite the clumsiness this system worked. Sacajewea with her baby on her back braved every hardship the expedition faced to the Pacific and back. One scholar said the European conquest of the America’s could not have been done without the help of three women:
Pocahontas, Malinche’ the Aztec Princess and Sacajewea.

1842- Abe Lincoln, 33, and Mary Todd, 23, marry. Mary Lincoln came from a pro Southern Kentucky family and was always at odds with Washington society. At one point Congress even held a hearing on whether the First Lady was a Confederate spy.
Mary was as volatile as Abe was laid back and they would have marital fights right in front of officers and dignitaries causing everyone to hang their heads in embarrassment. Most of her children had died by the time Lincoln was shot and the grief broke her sanity causing her surviving son Robert Lincoln to lock her up for her remaining years.

1854- THE LADY WITH THE LAMP- English nurse Florence Nightingale arrived at Scutari Turkey to care for English wounded from the Crimean War. The English Army medical system then was a disaster of outmoded bureaucracy. Hundreds of sick and dying men were piled up bed to bed in a hospital 4 miles square without basic sanitary conditions- no blankets, fresh clothes or fresh food. Rich English aristocrat Florence Nightingale brought her own finances to clothe, feed and care for the sick. Even just doing laundry saved lives because men had clean linens to sleep on. She told her volunteers “The strongest women must stand with me at the washtub!” She had no official status or commission from the government, but she revolutionized the military hospital system and the nursing profession, often fighting stodgy old generals who saw her as a troublemaker. Chief surgeon Sir John Hall growled:” The woman insists on grotesque excess and luxury- after all, what does a soldier want with a toothbrush?”

1861- University of Washington founded in Seattle.

1862- Richard J. Gatling patented the machine gun. “It is to the pistol as the sewing machine is to the simple sewing needle.” Gatling’s idea was to invent machines to make war too terrible to be waged any longer. What he succeeded in doing was to indeed make war more terrible.

1879- James Ritty of Dayton Ohio patented the cash register, invented as a way to keep employees from pocketing receipts.

1913- William Mulholland's great aqueduct starts bringing water 200 miles from Northern California to L.A. by the force of gravity alone. Without the extra water L.A. would never have grown any larger than 140,000 people.by L.A. Times estimate.

1918- Wilfred Owen, one of the greatest English poets of the age, died in combat in World War One only days from the final armistice cease fire.

1927- HOWARD CARTER OPENED THE TOMB OF KING TUT-ANKH-AMON ( King Tut ). Other royal tombs had been opened before but they had always been cleaned out centuries ago by grave robbers. King Tut’s was the first unspoiled Pharoah’s tomb to be discovered in modern times. The site was discovered under a house built for workers excavating the tomb of King Ramses IV. There was King Tut's Curse guarding the door, and a few folks like Lord Carnaervon did go to an early grave: allegedly from scratching a zit and getting blood poisoning, legend has it the same zit was found on King Tut’s mummy. But Howard Carter, the man who broke the seal, rifled the tomb and did everything but stick his fingers in Tut’s ears, lived to a merry old age and even pocketed a few artifacts he didn't feel like sharing with the British Museum. They were recently returned by an embarrassed family descendant.

1928- Arnold Rothstein, top New York gangster who got vaudeville dancer Jimmy Walker elected mayor and rigged the 1919 World Series, is shot in the groin during a poker game. It took him hours to die. When asked by the police who shot him Rothstein replied before losing consciousness: "If I live, I'll take care of it..."

1931-One of the pioneering trumpet innovators of the new music called Jazz was Buddy Bollen. He was one of the first soloists to improvise within the body of a song and so doing paved the way for the greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. But by 1931 Bollen was forgotten and died broke in the Louisiana Home for the Insane. His family couldn’t even afford a Dixieland Band to play at his funeral.

1939- President Roosevelt signs the Neutrality Act, declaring the U.S. would not get involved in the growing war between Hitler and Britain and France.

1939- Packard introduced the first air-conditioned automobile.

1952- UNIVAC, the first electronic business computer, accurately predicted Dwight Eisenhower would win in a landslide. The first computer projected results for an election.

1955- In Arizona Willie Bioff, former IATSE union official, who tried to hijack the Hollywood unions (Including the Disney cartoonists) for Frank Nitti's gang, turns the key in his Ford pickup and explodes. He had turned informer and was in the Wittness Protection plan. He had changed his name to Bill Nelson and was a friend of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater.

1956- The Soviets crush the Hungarian Revolt led by Imre Nagy.

1958- Angelo Roncalli was elected Pope John XXIII. John 23rd was one of the best loved popes of the twentieth century. He liberalized the Church through his council Vatican II, changed the Latin Mass into common language, encouraged folk masses and other reforms. Pope John Paul II has made more saints than any other Pope but withheld final sainthood for John XXIII because he was too liberal for his tastes.

1963- The Beatles are part of the Queens Royal Command performance in London. John Lennon tells the audience: “ Will the people in the cheap seats clap their hands?, and if the rest of you would just rattle your jewelry..”

1968- the first issue of Screw Magazine. Former reporter Jim Buckley and former industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation Al Goldstein named their magazine Screw after trying Hump, Love and being told they couldn't name it F**k.

1979- THE IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS- Iranian militants with the approval of the Iranian revolutionary government and the Ayatollah Khomeni attack the U.S. embassy in Teheran and take most of the 90 staff hostage for 444 days. The event infuriated US opinion and there were loud calls to nuke the Mad Mullahs. Truth be told, without condoning such an outrage the US public remained blissfully ignorant of how our CIA helped the overthrow of the democratic regime of Mossadegh in 1953 that established the Shah’s autocratic regime and that the coup was directed from within the US embassy, but hey, that’s just details. The crisis seemed to paralyze the Jimmy Carter administration and probably helped elect Ronald Reagan. The incident also proved that the Cold War East-West way of judging world politics was now outdated since the Ayatollah declared both America and Russia “Great Satans”!

1980- Yomiuri Giants baseball great Saduharu Oh retired after hitting 868 homeruns in his 22 year career. Apologists for American home run records like Aaron and Bonds claim it is not the same, since Japanese baseball fields are smaller than American. (?)

1993- The Topanga-Malibu fires., Huge brush fires burn expensive homes in Malibu. The fires reached from the Santa Monica Mountains down to the ocean. Eyewitnesses said the 200 foot flames were reflected in the sky and water turning everything orange and the landscape looked more like Mars than Malibu. In 2007 more fires ravaged the Malibu.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
QUIZ: How many wars has the US fought with France?

ANSWER: None. The United States fought two wars against Great Britain, We invaded Canada at least four times, two wars against Germany, one against Japan, Mexico, Korea, Spain, Vietnam, Afghanistan and two against Iraq. Americans fought the French as British subjects in the French and Indian War, had an almost war in 1804 and exchanged shots with pro-facist Vichy forces in North Africa for one day in 1942, But otherwise…no.

France helped America win our revolution against Britain. George Washington’s army were supplied by French money, wore uniforms made in France, fired guns with French gunpowder. The French fleet drove off the British navy trying to save Lord Cornwallis, making the final victory at Yorktown possible. The French selling Louisiana doubled the size of the US overnight and made the eventual expansion to the Pacific possible.

So what is the origin of this Francophobia? Perhaps it was when DeGaulle annoyed Kennedy by refusing to cooperate in the Cold War rivalry with Russia? Or the innate insecurity of parochial Americans when confronted with good cooking? We may never know.


RSS